"Muse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pots; Repertory for gin and jeux d'esprit, Literary pound for vagrant rapartee; Second-hand shop for left-off witticisms; Gall'ry for Tomkins and Pitt-icisms;[3] Foundling hospital for every bastard pun; In short, a manufactory for all sorts of fun! * * * * Arouse my muse! such pleasing themes to quit, Hear me while I say "Donnez-moi du frenzy, s'il vous plait!"[4] Give me a most tremendous fit Of indignation, a wild volcanic ebullition, Or deep anathema, Fatal as J—d's bah! To hurl excisemen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs, the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches, the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic sewer still cynically ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... half-romantic habits, and it seemed natural to them that on his first return, after so many years of wandering, to scenes endeared to him by innumerable fond recollections, he should wander forth alone to muse with his own soul ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... thar is ther simplest way o' doin' business. Ef we makes a mistake, an' gits ther wrong galoot, nobody ever kicks up much o' a row over it, fer we're naterally lively over thar, an' we must hev somethin' ter 'muse us 'bout ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... succession of kindly and learned men to the public service through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it finally died out with Constance de Theis, Princesse de Salm, who was known under the Directory and the Empire in Paris as the 'Muse of Reason,' and the 'Boileau of Women,' and with her nephew, the last Baron de Theis, one of the most charming of men, and one of the most conscientious and accurate of archaeologists and collectors. The baron died in 1874. The 'objets d'art et de haute curiosite,' brought together ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... miles?" Her broken shoes Had told of more than one. She answered like a dreaming Muse, "I came ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... each other, and meet at Boker's, now and again, for golden talks on Sundays. Poetry was a passion with them, and even when two—Boker and Taylor—were sent abroad on diplomatic missions, they could never have been said to desert the Muse—their literary activity was merely arrested. One of the four—Stoddard—often felt, in the presence of Boker, a certain reticence due to lack of educational advantages; but in the face of Boker's graciousness—a quality which comes with culture ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... the heart and the imagination, prompted by nature and uttered because they are irrepressible. Many females travel for the purpose of writing and publishing books—whilst Mrs. Heman's, Mrs. Osgood's, and Mrs. Sigourney's volumes may be regarded as grateful offerings to the muse in ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Your lonely muse, unraimented with rhyme, Her hair unfilleted, her feet unshod, Naked and not ashamed demands of God No covering for her beauty's youth or prime. Clad but with thought, as space is clad with time, Or both with worlds where man and angels plod, She runs in joy, magnificently ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... printed in a journal to which ANDREW LANG is an occasional contributor. I myself have never dared to go so far. There is something sacred about an established reputation. And I can honestly say that I like the elegant airy trifles which your little Muse has bestowed upon us, though I confess to a weariness when the talk is too much of golf-clubs and salmon rods. And I admire your appreciation of the original work of other men. In the present case you and I disagree upon a question of taste. That is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... is ordered. And we cannot allow you to pitch your stage in the agora, and make your voices to be heard above ours, or suffer you to address our women and children and the common people on opposite principles to our own. Come then, ye children of the Lydian Muse, and present yourselves first to the magistrates, and if they decide that your hymns are as good or better than ours, you shall have your ...
— Laws • Plato
... you muse and writhe under the tortures of your guilty acts," continued Ella, in the same bitter tone; "for you have much to ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... and high spirit of Virgil, and the vehement declamation of Juvenal, but, had the verses of Lucretius perished, we should never have known that it could give utterance to the grandest conceptions with all that sustained majesty and harmonious swell in which the Grecian Muse rolls forth her ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Colonel, he ate nothing, sat sunk in a muse, and only awoke occasionally to a sense of where he was, and what he was supposed to be doing. On each of these occasions he showed a gratitude and kind courtesy that endeared him to me beyond expression. 'Champdivers, my lad, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... raincoated, still bore the icy chill of the concert hall, a quorum of painters besieged the artist supply stores for the precious remaining tubes of burntumber and scarletlake, while it was presumed that in traditionally unheated garrets orthodox poets nourished their muse on pencil erasers. But all enthusiasm was individual property, the reaction of single persons with excess adrenalin. No common interests united doctor and stockbroker, steelworker and truckdriver, laborer and laundryman, except common fear of the Grass, briefly dormant ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... visiting him in the evening, he ordered forth all his understrappers and hangers-on, and made them submit to the fearful ordeal of head pummelling, first begging me to speak out everything, and then calling for fire to light his pipe, that he might muse over the exhibition à la Turque. The first officer examined was collector of the revenue, a native of Derge, a regular task-master in his way, and very malicious; I was frightened what to say. All was attention, the Rais particularly wishing to know if he was a thief, and had secreted ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... startled while I sat in my muse to hear a footstep coming. A steady, regular footstep; no light trip of children; and the hands were in the field, and this was not a step like any of them. My first thought was, the overseer's come to spy me out. The next ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... course was Mrs Harper, a colored woman; about as colored as some of the Cuban belles I have met with at Saratoga. She has a noble head, this bronze muse; a strong face, with a shadowed glow upon it, indicative of thoughtful fervor, and of a nature most femininely sensitive, but not in the least morbid. Her form is delicate, her hands daintily small. She stands quietly ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... had the divine spark. She may have possibly deserved the epithet of the "tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancient writers, or of "the Poetess," as Homer was "the Poet." Among the one hundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty—the following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and in much the same style—suggesting ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 'Twere well the cares of day to toss aside And welcome evening's quiet with a smile, But we who here in solemn conclave meet Can squander moment few to court the Muse; Stern duty calls, and to each patriot ear 'Tis music sweet, to which he quick responds, Then to the council board let us repair And these the mysteries ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... telling me, he could have wished I had rather turned my thoughts to the comic than the tragic muse; for tragedy was less fashionable, and consequently less profitable both to the house and the author, than comedy or opera. I sighed and answered, it was an ill proof of public taste, when it could receive greater pleasure from the unconnected scenes ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... 1880 I was appointed auditor of the Official Accounts of Iceland, and got married. During the ten ensuing years I was buried under an avalanche of accounts and official documents and could hardly hold my head up above the waters. The wings of my soul drooped with exhaustion. My dramatic muse awakened several times, but I could not receive her visits. At last, in 1890, I began to write "Skipit sekkur" [The Ship is Sinking,—a naturalistic drama], parts of which I rewrote seven times; so badly had I treated my muse that she began to work ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... forsaken and forgot! All men failed thee to visit save Some idle lover of sylvan haunts Who trod, perchance, this hallowed spot, And cast a pensive eye upon This lovely glade, thy sole abode (Full lost in these continuous woods), And brooding o'er thy lowly lot, Oft thus did muse: "This cabin lone Here stands to tell the tale of him, Back-woodsman brave, who having scaled The mystic mountains ne'er returned To them, though loved yet left behind; But here he chose his last abode, These ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together I found to be utterly untenable. We talk of peace and learning, of peace and plenty, of peace and civilisation; but I found that these are not the words that the Muse of History coupled together; that on her lips the words were peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and death. I found in brief that all great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they were nourished in ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... Impromptu de Versailles. The outline is as follows:—Moliere is discovered impatient and uneasy; the King waits, and the comedians are not ready. He sinks asleep, and has a vision, in which the muse emerges out of a cloud, escorted by AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and Beaumarchais, to each of whom are assigned a few lines—where possible, lines of their own—in praise of equality and fraternity. They vanish, and Moliere ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Howard's tomb soft Pity weeps, Bewailing still her favourite's fate; And thence the Muse invokes her aid Of kindred merit ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... floor, a yellow samovar on a table near the window, and the master of the house himself in skull-cap and dressing-gown, with a brilliant streak of sunlight falling on his cheek! Oh, the long-haired nurslings of the Muse, wearing spasmodic and contemptuous smiles, that cluster about them! Oh, the young ladies, with faces of greenish pallor, who squeal; over their pianos! For that is the established rule with us in Russia; a man cannot be devoted to one art alone—he must have them all. And so it is not to ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... wit borrow a feather From Cupid's own pinion, 'tis doubtfullish whether A "mot" might be made which should happily hit The "gold" of desert; and Love, aided by Wit, Though equal to eloquent passion's fine glow, Might both be struck mute by the Muse of Dumb-Show. That "actions speak louder than words" we all knew; But now we may add, "and more gracefully, too." Performances fine Punch has praised in his day, But how few take the pas of the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... as she moved in rhythmic sway to the inspiring music, that she was supported by the strong arm of his distingue- looking brother-in-law, who seemed, he thought, to be paying more homage than usual to the Terpsichorean Muse, and one particular lady. ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... quickly to restore warmth I muse upon my eccentric friend, and cannot help asking myself this question: Did he really replace the gilded image of the god Mercurius with the rest of the treasures? He seemed to do so; and yet I could not ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... conversation with his mistress; so he merely scratched his head, and thought hard to find what he'd say next. I doubt whether the conviction, which was then strong on his mind, that Meg was listening at the keyhole to every word that passed, at all assisted him in the operation. At last, some Muse came to his aid, and ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... not arise for him, or if it did, his sin was easily detected. Herein he is a good model, especially for poets who are apt to lose sight of the earth and pass into an unearthly paradise of vague feelings. For the greatest poetry is the poetry of things, not of words, and to whatever regions the Muse may take her flight, she can only be safe if she starts from Earth, and keeps her communication ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... His inspirations are more real than others, for they do but feign a God, but he has his by him. His verse runs like the tap, and his invention as the barrel, ebbs and flows at the mercy of the spiggot. In thin drink he aspires not above a ballad, but a cup of sack inflames him, and sets his muse and nose a-fire together. The press is his mint, and stamps him now and then a six-pence or two in reward of the baser coin his pamphlet. His works would scarce sell for three half-pence, though they ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Manor by the Thames; I've seen it oft through beechen stems In leafy Summer weather; We've moored the punt its lawns beside Where peacocks strut in flaunting pride, The Muse and I together. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... these walks, I had been able to muse upon the pleasure that there would be in the friendship of the Duchesse de Guermantes, in fishing for trout, in drifting by myself in a boat on the Vivonne; and, greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and practical; a little ahead of my time perhaps, but far from crude or unformed. As I see it now, my creed was rather a protest against indifference, a demand for some measure of activity in social economy. That my muse was socialistic seems to me now to have been mainly accidental, but so it was, and its nutriment had been drawn largely from such sources as Carpenter's Civilization: its Cause and Cure, in addition to the standard works ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the other two bear figures of Muses. The latter are posed and draped with that delightful grace of which Praxiteles was master, and with which he seems to have inspired his pupils The execution, however, is not quite faultless, as witness the distortion in the right lower leg of the seated Muse in ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... gave birth to a daughter—and died within a fortnight afterward. In all truth, I may say that life, for Billy Gray, ended that day. To lose this tenth muse—I can think of nothing more complete in tragedy except the loss of her father of Marjorie Fleming. And he, like Marjorie Fleming's father, spoke her name no more—until near the end. When after twenty years, his own time came, Stallard, LeBrun the poet and Lars Wark ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... night with a vengeance;—and what then? Why, next morning I was horrified by seeing that it had struck, and split upon, the petticoat of Euterpe's graven image in the garden, and grimed her as if it were on purpose[45]. Only think of my distress,—and the epigrams that might be engendered on the Muse ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... ground. For here the Muse so oft her harp hath strung, That not a mountain rears its head unsung; Renown'd in verse each shady thicket grows, And ev'ry stream in ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... restrain the course of nature and its fruits, aided by the energies of man to develop or to use them, as it would be to bind down the mind of a man of genius, or of a poet, in order to prevent their operation, or to hinder the great conceptions of their muse, or the scientific research which a bright genius renders serviceable to his fellow mortals, from ever seeing the light. No one will defend the justice or wisdom of the time which forbade Galileo to publish, or even himself to believe in, his great discoveries; but is ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... with thee, My shoulders from all burdens free. Our native soyle again to see Rich to my selfe I sing, Whil'st care strikes thee, and thy Muse dumb, The heavy weight of thy vast summe, Or what estate in time to come The faithlesse rout may bring. Hee's rich that nothing hath; Hee that In's certaine hand holds his estate, That makes himselfe his constant mate ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... that would be intolerable in prose is tolerable in the introduction to a poem. See the long interval at the beginning of Paradise Lost between "Of man's first disobedience" and "Sing, heavenly Muse." Compare also the beginning ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... presence made itself sensible, and the Easy Chair recognized the poet's Muse, who had come for him. The poet put the question to her. "Young?" she said. "Why, you and I are always young, silly boy! Get your hat, and come over to Long Island City with me, and see the pussy-willows along the railroad-banks. The mosquitoes are beginning ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... thus they would muse; if their grief were the grief of oppression they would wish themselves kings; if their grief were poverty, wish themselves millionaires; if sin, they would wish they were saints or angels; if despised love, that they were some much-courted Adonis of county fame. Some had been known ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... midst of the knot of political celebrities. Lousteau performed the part of cicerone to admiration; with every sentence he uttered Dauriat rose higher in Lucien's opinion. Politics and literature seemed to converge in Dauriat's shop. He had seen a great poet prostituting his muse to journalism, humiliating Art, as woman was humiliated and prostituted in those shameless galleries without, and the provincial took a terrible lesson to heart. Money! That was the key to every enigma. Lucien realized the fact that he was unknown and alone, and that the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... and lithe, had seemed to slip like a shadow into hiding below the drying flake. Jimmie continued to muse. What had it been? A prowling dog? Then he laughed a little at his own fears—and continued on his way. But he kept watch on the flake; and so intent was he upon this, so busily was he wondering whether or not his eyes had tricked him, that ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... rather in too much than in too little invention; it would seem that Kaskel's brain, overflowing with musical ideas, wanted to put them all into this one first child of his muse. This promises well for the future, but it explains, why it lacks the great attraction of Cavalleria with which it has some relation, without imitating it in the least. The hearer's attention is tired by too much and divided by lack of unity. Nevertheless the composer has ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... would think of it. And, so as not to have to think of it, he would try to walk himself to a standstill. Unfortunately the head will continue working when the legs are at rest. And when he sat opposite to her at meal-times, Frances Freeland would gaze piercingly at his forehead and muse: 'The dear boy looks much better, but he's getting a little line between his brows—it IS such a pity!' It worried her, too, that the face he was putting on their little holiday together was not quite as full as she could have wished—though the last thing in the world she could tolerate were ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... anni!) the writer of this induced his friend Sir Egerton Brydges to print the Nymphidia at his private press; and it would give him pleasure, should your Notes be now instrumental to the production of a tasteful selection from the copious materials furnished by Drayton's prolific muse. Notwithstanding that selections are not generally approved, in this case it would be (if judiciously done) acceptable, and, it is to be ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... all-composing Hour Resistless falls; the Muse obeys the Power. She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold, Of Night primaeval and of Chaos old! Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... restless, unsettled, capricious man, whose life was nothing but an investigation, a transformation, a perpetual battle with his vast genius. As a young man, when he was already famous as a poet, he abandoned the Muse and entered politics; he emigrated with the stadtholder to England, and gave lessons in London to earn a livelihood. He tired of England and went to Germany; bored by German romanticism, he returned to Holland, where Louis Bonaparte overwhelmed him with favors. When Louis left the throne, Napoleon ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... change with Clancy — go a-droving? tell us true, For we rather think that Clancy would be glad to change with you, And be something in the city; but 'twould give your muse a shock To be losing time and money through the foot-rot in the flock, And you wouldn't mind the beauties underneath the starry dome If you had a wife and children and a lot of ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... Cornucopias, or horns of abundance—Limones, or meadows—Pinakidions, or tablets—Pancarpes, or all sorts of fruits; titles not unhappily adapted for the miscellanists. The nine books of Herodotus, and the nine epistles of AEschines, were respectively honoured by the name of a Muse; and three orations of the latter, by those ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... imagination have seldom resorted to the vague and the unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horror alone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means of subjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever a household and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly in the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery and terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deserve the name of art, not artifice. We cannot ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her, beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse, descended on the one side from Memory, or superficial fact, but on the other from Zeus, the soul of fact; and being gifted to discern the divine halo on the brows of humanity, she rightly obtains ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... shadow of 'Talbot's tower,' we might prefer to muse historically, and gather up our memories of facts connected with the place; but we are treading again upon 'the footsteps of the Conqueror,' and must pay for our indiscretion. From the moment we approach the precincts of the castle, we are pounced upon by the inevitable spider (in this instance, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... walls. Some of those that remain to us have a classical stiffness, reminding one of the Paduan school; others, and these his best, remind one of the work of Botticelli. There is, for instance, the figure of a Muse, elaborately modelled under her ample drapery, seated cross-legged by a playing fountain, on a carpet of exquisitely designed ground-ivy, a little bare trellis behind her, a tortoise lyre in her hand; which has in it somewhat of that odd, vague, questioning ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... man and of excellent character, highly esteemed in the town, Secretary to the Assembly and a very tolerable poet. Keimer also made verses, but they were indifferent ones. He could not be said to write in verse, for his method was to set the lines as they followed from his muse; and as he worked without copy, had but one set of letter cases, and as the elegy would occupy all his types, it was impossible for any one to assist him. I endeavored to put his press in order, which ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Muse shall fill my strain To sing thy praises; thou hadst spent thy time Not idly, nor hadst lived thy life in vain, Unfitted for the guerdon of my rhyme. For lo, the Funds went sudden crashing down, And ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... we meant." Then what is it that is meant, gentlemen? The outcome, the final outcome, of British rule in India may be a profitable topic for the musings of meditative minds. But we are not here to muse. We have the duty of the day to perform, we have the tasks of to-morrow spread out before us. In the interests of India, to say nothing of our own national honour, in the name of duty and of common sense, our first ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... the same year he wrote a poem De Suo Consulatu, in three Books: ad Att. i. 19, 10, 'poema exspectato, ne quod genus a me ipso laudis meae praetermittatur.' A long passage from Book ii., spoken by the Muse Urania, is recited by Q. Cicero in De ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... see in the then bare loneliness of the typical New England home a beauty worth the attention of his fastidious and lofty-minded muse. And that New England homes, at that time, were bare of what we, to-day, deem the absolute necessities of life, no student of the past pretends ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... before. It was for "The Cabarus" then, and her Muscadins and Money-changers, that we fought? It was for Balls in flesh-coloured drawers that we took Feudalism by the beard, and did, and dared, shedding our blood like water? Expressive Silence, muse thou their praise!— ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Some streaks of love, both human and divine; From hence Astraea took her flight, and here Still her last footsteps upon earth appear. 'Tis true, the first desire which does control All the inferior wheels that move my soul, Is, that the Muse me her high priest would make; Into her holiest scenes of mystery take, And open there to my mind's purged eye Those wonders which to sense the gods deny; How in the moon such chance of shapes is found The moon, the changing ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... from that date the poem was seven times reissued. This happened without the sanction or the supervision of the luckless author; and from the sale of the book he obtained no profit. Leonora d'Este died upon February 10, 1581. A volume of elegies appeared on this occasion; but Tasso's Muse uttered no sound.[54] He wrote to Panigarola that 'a certain tacit repugnance of his genius' forced him to be mute.[55] His rival Guarini undertook a revised edition of his lyrics in 1582. Tasso had to bear this dubious compliment in silence. All Europe was devouring his poems; scribes ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... fresco luncheon in the wood at Medmenham, and then dinner, and then music, an evening spent half within and half without the music-room, cigarettes sparkling, like glowworms on the terrace, tall talk from Mr. Meander, long quotations from his own muse and that of Rossetti, a little Shelley, a little Keats, a good deal of Swinburne. The festivities were late on this second evening, as Mr. Smithson had invited a good many people from the neighbourhood, but the house party were not the less early on the following ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... a description of the Oroquieta ball, and, like the poets, pray to some kind muse to guide my pen. To-night I feel again the same thrill that I felt the night of the grand Oroquieta ball. The memories of Oroquieta music seem as though they might express ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... I am lying on the white floorcloth of my little room, with a drawing book trying to draw pictures,—by no means an arduous pursuit of the pictorial muse, but just a toying with the desire to make pictures. The most important part is that which remains in the mind, and of which not a line gets drawn on the paper. And in the meantime the serene autumn afternoon is filtering through the walls of this little Calcutta room filling ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... a time to work, but also to muse and dream while working. In the air was something that invited, almost demanded reverie. Upon the fields there might lie many a mortgage, but who at such a time could worry over the harsh exactions ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Cascading, intermittent, choppy, The brittle voice of Mrs. Fiske Shall serve me now as copy. Assist me, O my Muse, what time I pen a bit of ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... Muse a gravely jocund note in his "Seasons' Comfort." He, too, of the four fellow-versifiers shows the greater aptitude for experiments, though it may perhaps be felt that his touch is nowhere quite so sure, nor his artistic ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... maturer taste of the poet, The Miller's Daughter was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson's domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in "minnows" where "fish" had been the reading, and where "trout" ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Hamilton at first proposes to Grammont, as capable of writing his life (though, on reflection, he thinks them not suited to it), is Boileau, whose genius he professes to admire; but adds that his muse has somewhat of malignity; and that such a muse might caress with one hand and satirize him with the other. This letter was sent by Hamilton to Boileau, who answered him with great politeness; but, at the same time that he highly extolled ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... increase of public decency is illustrated by the disappearance from the stage of the coarseness of earlier times. It was the golden age of the drama; for it saw the acting of Macklin and Garrick, of Mrs. Siddons, "the tragic muse," and her brother John Kemble, of Mrs. Abington, Miss Farren, "the comic muse," afterwards Countess of Derby, and Mrs. Jordan. As dramatists Home, Foote, Colman, and Cumberland deserve to be mentioned; ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Alps for the second time, not on the French side now, but across the Spluegen, through Switzerland, his genius touched him again, as had happened in those high regions three years before on the road to Italy. But this time it was not in the guise of the Latin Muse, who then drew from him such artful and pathetic poetical meditations about his past life and pious vows for the future;—it was something much more subtle and ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... their worst garments, sprinkled ashes on their heads, and gathering in throngs on the public squares, they shed tears, and murmured bitterly against the Muse for ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... if with doubt the bosom heaves. The heart for Grecian sorrows grieves, And pines to see them fail. Such critics sometimes court the muse, And I perchance the rhymes peruse, Then heaves ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... shade of a spreading beech-tree reclining, Meditatest, with slender pipe, the Muse of the woodlands. We our country's bounds and pleasant pastures relinquish, We our country fly; thou, Tityrus, stretched in the shadow, Teachest the woods to resound with the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... bombastic insults at the authorities in Rome, until the Government found it opportune to take them in hand. The greatest Italian poet and one of the greatest imaginative writers in Europe will now be able to devote himself—if his rather morbid Muse has suffered no injury—to his predestined task. Those—the comparatively few that read—whose acquaintance with this writer's work usually caused them to regret his methods, could not help admiring his personal ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... We muse beside the rolling waves; We ponder on the grassy hill; We linger by the new-piled graves, And find that star is shining still. God in his great design hath spread, Unnumber'd rays to lead afar; They beam the brightest o'er the dead, And ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... chaste, his judgment could explore The beauties of poetic lore, Or classic strains mellifluent infuse; Yet glowing genius and expanded sense Were crown'd with innate diffidence, The sure attendant of a genuine muse." ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... The Englishman seemed to muse, for his brow lowered, and he made no answer. Legard threw himself back, overcome with his own excitement, and wept like a child. The stranger, who imagined himself above the indulgence of emotion (vain man!), woke from his revery at this burst of passion. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... quit this national trait. The English naval muse, which I presume must be a Mermaid, half woman and half fish, has, by her simple and half the time, nonsensical songs, done more for the British flag than all her gunnery, or naval discipline and tactics. This inspiration of the tenth muse, with libations ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... what hope have I of fame, Who am, as Nature made me, still the same? And thou, poor suitor to a bankrupt muse, How mad thy toil, how arrogant thy views! What though endued with Genius' power to move The magick chords of sympathy and love, The painter's eye, the poet's fervid heart, The tongue of eloquence, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... the name Urania is assigned to two divinities wholly distinct. The first is one of the nine Muses, the Muse of Astronomy: the second is Aphrodite (Venus). We may without any hesitation assume that Shelley meant one of these two: but a decision, as to which of the two becomes on reflection by no means so obvious as one might at first suppose. ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... may have heard how Raymond de Brocas soothed the dying bed of my father, and tended him when all else, even his son, had fled from his side; and albeit at the moment even that service did not soften my hard heart, in the times that followed, when I was left alone to muse on what had passed, I repented me of my old and bitter enmity, and resolved, if ever we should meet again, to strive to make amends for the past. I knew that he loved you, and that you loved him; and I vowed I ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... did not suffice to sit with Shirley in her panelled parlour, where others came and went, and where he could rarely find a quiet moment to show her the latest production of his fertile muse; he must have her out amongst the pleasant pastures, and lead her by the still waters. Tete-a-tete ramblings she shunned, so he made parties for her to his own grounds, his glorious forest; to remoter scenes—woods severed by the Wharfe, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... for what? Thorpe, as this question put itself in his mind, halted before a shop-window full of soft-hued silk fabrics, to muse upon an answer. The delicate tints and surfaces of what was before his eyes seemed somehow to connect themselves with the subject. Plowden himself was delicately-tinted and refined of texture. Vindictiveness was too plain and coarse an emotion to sway such a complicated and polished organism. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... as an affront. Such was that of Timagenes to the husband of a woman that often vomited,—"Thou beginnest thy troubles by bringing home this vomiting woman," saying [Greek omitted] (this vomiting woman), when the poet had written [Greek omitted] (this Muse); and also his question to Athenodorus the philosopher,—Is affection to our children natural? For when the raillery is not founded on some present circumstance, it is an argument of ill-nature and a mischievous temper; and such as these do often for a mere word, the lightest thing in the world ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... about more helpless than anything I have ever seen, falling into everything he could fall into, biting several of the crew. You know the sonnet in which Baudelaire compares the bird on the wing to the poet with the Muse beside him, and the albatross on deck to the poet in the drawing-room. You remember the sonnet, how the sailors teased the bird with their ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... still bubbles forth beside a cluster of farm-buildings, which is said to be the veritable Fountain of Egeria. The temple of the Muses, who were Egeria's counsellors, was close by; and the name of the gate of the city, Porta Capena, was in all likelihood a corruption of Camena, the Latin name for Muse, and was not derived, as some suppose, from the city of Capua. The spot outside the present walls, formerly visited as the haunt of the fabled nymph, before the discovery of the site of the Capena gate fixed its true position—beautiful ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... belong; Tis thine to shape my course, to light my way, To nerve my country with the patriot lay, To teach all men where all their interest lies, How rulers may be just and nations wise: Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee, Invoke no miracle, no Muse ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... round with a maze of flowers chains. As the car moved, they accompanied it with a dance of unspeakable ease, modesty, grace. A local poet—not Simonides, not Pindar, but some humbler bard—had invoked his muse for the grand occasion. Youths and maidens burst forth ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... to us in haste; away, Leave thy Thespian hollow-arch'd Rock, muse-haunted, Aonian, Drench'd in spray from aloft, the cold Drift of ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... I have seen more of Mrs. Westlake. She is a tenth muse, the muse of lyrical Socialism. From which of them the impulse came I have no means of knowing, but surely it must have been from her. In her case I can understand it; she lives in an asthetic reverie; she idealises everything. Naturally she knows nothing whatever ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... ground, as may be seen in his "Holy Family" in the National Gallery. But we doubt if the critique upon his "Mrs Siddons" is quite fair. The chair and the footstool may not be on the cloud, a tragic and mysterious vapour reconciling the bodily presence of the muse with the demon and fatal ministers of the drama that attend her. Though Sir Joshua's words are here brought against him, it is without attention to their application in his critique, which condemned their form and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... your soul could not but know mine that That gave up in your ghost but just now his: As soul is known from soul so is your ghost Known to the Muses by my muse that's yours. ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... send to Covent Garden for huge nosegays, and get out the best bottle of Burgundy. We will pass an evening worthy of Horace, and with garlands and libations honour the muse ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... ballad, and verse by verse, noting the true, tender, and the natural sublime from affectation and fustian. "To this," he said, "I am convinced that I owe much of my critic craft, such as it is." His mother, too, unconsciously led him in the ways of the muse: she loved to recite or sing to him a strange, but clever ballad, called "the Life and Age of Man:" this strain of piety and imagination was in his mind when he wrote "Man ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Though daily I observed in my breast What sharp conflicts disquiet her so sore, That heavy sleep cannot procure her rest, But fearful dreams present her evermore Most hideous sights her quiet to molest; That starting oft therewith, she doth awake, To muse upon those fancies which torment Her thoughtful heart with horror, that doth make Her cold chill sweat break forth incontinent From her weak limbs. And while the quiet night Gives others rest, she, turning to and fro, Doth wish for day: but when the day brings light, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... my theme inspire! To woman's love of old, my muse aspire! When her sweet charms were equally bestowed, And fairest of the sex with hopes imbued Of capturing men of wealth and lives of ease, When loveliness at public sale[5] doth please The nobles of ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... spot for a poet to muse in! How he could roll his azure eyes and comb out his locks with his lily-white taper fingers, and gaze into space for a word to rhyme! How he would wrinkle his lofty brow, compress his cupidon upper lip, and unloose his neglige necktie, to give room for his ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... GIOVANNI BERCHET, died near the first of January. Born, says the Athenaeum, at Milan, in 1788, he imbibed at an early age that hatred of the rule of Austria which a few years afterwards inspired his muse. It was when the well-known political events of 1821 forced him to leave his country, that his active mind, fervently devoted to the principles of rational liberty, burst forth in those powerful and touching ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... mind. Such is the ideal of human beauty according to which the antique conceptions were formed, and we see it in the divine forms of a Niobe, of the Apollo Belvedere, in the winged Genius of the Borghese, and in the Muse of the Barberini palace. There, where grace and dignity are united, we experience by turns attraction and repulsion; attraction as spiritual creatures, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... day, he being come thus well nigh to the beginning of May and the weather being very fair, that, having entered into thought of his cruel mistress, he bade all his servants leave him to himself, so he might muse more at his leisure, and wandered on, step by step, lost in melancholy thought, till he came [unwillingly] into the pine-wood. The fifth hour of the day was well nigh past and he had gone a good half mile into the wood, remembering him ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... The people's tears, were all sincere: Even they to whom he riches gave Carried him heavily to the grave. All hearts were struck at the king's end; His house-thralls wept as for a friend; His court-men oft alone would muse, As pondering o'er ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... intimate knowledge of historic detail is the secret of life, of the impression of life; puts his own imagination on the wing; secures the imaginative cooperation of the reader. A stately age—to us, perhaps, in the company of the historic muse, seeming even more stately than it actually was—it is pleasant to find it, as we do now and again on these pages, in graceful deshabille. With perfect lightness of touch, M. Filon seems to have a complete command of all the physiognomic details of ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... shall hear to-night! I, who have heard every fine voice in Europe, confidently pledge my respectability that the Ravenswing is equal to them all. She has the graces, sir, of a Venus with the mind of a Muse. She is a siren, sir, without the dangerous qualities of one. She is hallowed, sir, by her misfortunes as by her genius; and I am proud to think that my instructions have been the means of developing the wondrous qualities that were latent ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... there, though last not least, is Aetion; A gentler shepheard may nowhere be found; Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention, Doth like ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... I was struck by the fact that nearly all the songs were of an extremely melancholy nature—the chief objects celebrated by the Muse being withered flowers, little coffins, the corpses of sweethearts, last farewells, and hopeless partings on the lonely shore. Tears flow; ladies sigh; voices choke; hearts break; children die; lovers prove untrue. It was tragic, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... born in 1703. He was the son of a schoolmaster in Mansfield, but went into domestic service as a footman, and held several respectable situations. While in this capacity, he employed his leisure time in composing poetry, and he appropriately named his first production "A Muse in Livery." The most pleasant and interesting of these early poems is that in which he gives an account of his daily life, showing how observant a footman may be. It is in the form of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... separate distinction from all other mornings, in a way that entitles it to its own separate share in the general commemoration. A shadow fell upon this particular morning as from a cloud of danger, that lingered for a moment over our heads, might seem even to muse and hesitate, and then sullenly passed away into distant quarters. It is noticeable that a danger which approaches, but wheels away,—which threatens, but finally forbears to strike,—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect than the danger which ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... tall screen I saw her trail in, a figure of beauty in her white satin dress and sombre purple cloak, her dark hair wreathed with a fillet of emerald laurel leaves that gave her face the look of some tragic muse of long ago. "I know Jim White," she hurried on, "and he knows me well enough to be sure I'm here for nothing wrong! I'm not afraid of him. It's you I'm ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to muse away from her as before. "There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of his heart every man would like at times to have his courage tested; to ...
— Different Girls • Various
... He appeared to muse, and no one disturbed him in the minutes of silence that followed. Finally he ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... autumn of that year we became great friends; and through her influence I began to see beyond the portals of the mansions of the rich. Matthew Prior's Chloes and Sir John Suckling's Euphelias lost their charms. Henceforth my muse's name became Phyllis. I took her to the opera when I didn't know where I was going to breakfast on the morrow. I sent her roses and went without tobacco, a privation ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... happy, so all in all to each other, as they left that barren threshold! And the priest felt all this, as, melancholy and envious, he turned from the door in that November day, to find himself thoroughly alone. He now began seriously to muse upon those fancied blessings which men wearied with celibacy see springing, heavenward, behind the altar. A few weeks afterwards a notable change was visible in the good man's exterior. He became more careful ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Creole, "listen to a song of my country; we do not know how to make verses; we muse a simple recitative, without rhyme, and at each pause we improvise a couplet appropriate to the subject; it is very pastoral; it will please you, I am sure, master. This song is called the 'Loving Girl!' it is ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Muse, too, when her wings are dry, No frolic flight will take; But round a bowl she'll dip and fly, Like swallows round a lake. Then, if the nymph will have her share Before she'll bless her swain, Why that I think's a reason fair To fill ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... me is given Such hope, I know not fear; I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven That often meet me here. I muse on joy that will not cease, Pure spaces clothed in living beams, Pure lilies of eternal peace, Whose odors haunt my dreams; And, stricken by an angel's hand, This mortal armour that I wear, This weight and size, this heart and eyes, Are touch'd, are ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... be allowed to muse gently for several hours, inaccessible to the ambient air, and on the even and persevering heat of charcoal in the furnace or stove. After having lulled itself in its own exudations, and the dissolution of its auxiliaries, it may appear at table with a powerful claim to approbation."—Tabella ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... of the Italian cities, and that the difficulty of fame beyond our own village may make us more content with doing than desirous of the name of it. For, after all, History herself is for the most part but the Muse of Little Peddlington, and Athens raised the heaviest crop of laurels yet recorded on a few acres of rock, without help ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... which, indeed, would have been as distasteful to her as to their father. In another letter, addressed to her in the following August, he is not more frank. There he tells her that Annette is now his muse, and that, as Herodotus names the books of his History after the nine muses, so he has given the name of Annette to a collection of twelve poetical pieces, magnificently copied in manuscript.[27] ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... any of these was the tribute paid to women by the Minnesinger Henry of Meissen. Declining to single out any one fair Muse, he sang of womankind as a whole, and never ceased to praise their purity, their gentleness, and their nobility. Through his life he was honoured by them with the title of "Frauenlob" (praise of women), and at his death they marched in the funeral procession, and each threw a flower ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... of Sanskrit poetry, its tender love for the objects of nature, for flowers and animals and the similes and metaphors inspired thereby, and he invests them with all the grace and charm peculiar to his muse. Some of his finest verses owe their inspiration to the lotus; and in that famous poem "Die Lotosblume aengstigt,"—so beautifully set to music by Schumann—the favorite flower of India's poets may be said to have found its aesthetic ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... MUSE. Give me a kiss, my poet, take thy lyre; The buds are bursting on the wild sweet-briar. To-night the Spring is born—the breeze takes fire. Expectant of the dawn behold the thrush, Perched on the fresh branch of the first green bush; ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... innocent as a page of a scientific text-book. No woman even in the poetry had caused him to vibrate in the untouched heart-chords like this unexpected star in the firmament of beer fumes and tobacco smoke! But it was not joyous to muse upon this vision for he had no doubt that she marked a new starting-point in ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... moment from the gravity of the historic muse, we might conjure up the picture of this festival, we would invoke the imagination of the reader to that sacred ground decorated with the profusest triumphs of Grecian art—all Greece assembled from ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paint horrors, or death, or abominations. Their flagellated Christ, their arrow-riddled Sebastian, never writhe or howl with pain; indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Mantegna's print, puts the head of Holophernes into her bag with the serenity of a muse; and the head is quite clean, without loathsome drippings or torn depending strings of muscle; unconvulsed, a sort of plaster cast. The tragedy of Christ, the tragedy of Judith; the physical agency shadowing the moral agony; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... a muse; then said he, "May a knight have his free will and choice of castles, where he ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... replied Surrey; "I am well content with what has happened. Virgil and Homer, Dante and Petrarch, are the companions of my confinement; and in good sooth, I am glad to be alone. Amid the distractions of the court I could find little leisure for the muse." ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of Heaven with remembrances of earth, the whole procession of mortal travellers, all the dusty pilgrimage which he has witnessed, seems like a flitting show of phantoms for his thoughtful soul to muse upon." ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Cymbeline. The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers, abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical, and not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's Il Penseroso, pervades their poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... don't I destroy it?" Ballantyne repeated. "I ask myself that," and he took the photograph out of Thresk's hands and sat in a sort of muse, staring at it. Then he turned it over and took the edge between his forefinger and his thumb, hesitating whether he would not even at this moment tear it into strips and have done with it. But in the end he cast it upon the ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... away people's eyes from the real place where the booty lay. Indeed, Hounslow or Vigo—which matters much? The latter was a bad business, though Mr. Addison did sing its praises in Latin. That honest gentleman's muse had an eye to the main chance; and I doubt whether she saw much ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the race of poets was extinct, and he could only find the most wretched doggerel mongers, whose productions were too vile to be tolerated. Has the noble lord found a better rhymster? Or will the victory of the great Duke have to go unsung by the Muse?" ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in silence on their platform, breathing a little deeper when deepest approval stirred them, a little more quickly when her Muse took hold of Maga and thrilled her to expression of the thoughts unknown to people of the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... mind is its theologic determination. Nothing with him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in a church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right and wrong to man, had the same excess of influence for him, it has had for the nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the less ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... many a valley impleached with ivy and vine, Wherein the springs of all the streams run wine, And many a crag full-faced against the storm, The mountain where thy Muse's feet made warm Those lawns that revelled with her dance divine Shines yet with fire as it was wont to shine From tossing torches round ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... passion and the most poignant emotion of human nature, love. Chesterton, on the other hand, considers that Browning was the finest love poet of the world. It is real love poetry, because it talks about real people, not ideals; it does not muse of the Prince Charming meeting the Fairy Princess, and forget the devoted wife meeting her husband on the villa doorstep with open arms and a nice dinner in the parlour. Sentiment must be based on reality if it is to have worth. This is the strong point, for our ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... truth still lost in doubt. In either case, she deliberately dropped the subject. Iris took it up. Sitting by the only table in the room, she was in a position which placed her exactly opposite to one of the prints—the magnificent portrait of Mrs. Siddons as The Tragic Muse. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... muse in a crowd all day On the absent face that fixed you; Unless you can love as the angels may, With the breadth of heaven betwixt you; Unless you can dream that his faith is fast, Through behooving and unbehooving; Unless you can DIE when ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... especially England, he presented himself in no other aspect than that of a stern, haughty misanthrope, self-banished from the society of men, and most of all from that of Englishmen. The more beautiful and genial inspirations of his muse were looked upon but as lucid intervals between the paroxysms of an inherent malignancy of nature. But how totally all this differed from the Byron of the social hour, they who lived in familiar ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... The muse dictated nothing more. He was not in the mood for writing. He felt rather more in the mood for supper. His scruples scattered like clouds driven before a brisk North East wind; he put on the frogged surtout, and carried his reply himself. It was the first time that he had been ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... LYRIC POETRY.—It was not until the minds of the Greeks had been elevated by the productions of the epic muse, that the genius of original poets broke loose from the dominion of the epic style, and invented new forms for expressing the emotions of a mind profoundly agitated by passing events; with few innovations ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... another series of stories often reprinted from London editions were those moral tales with the sub-title "Cautionary Stories in Verse." Mr. William James used these "Cautionary Verses for Children" as an example of the manner in which "the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with the mind fixed on the ideas of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel of freedom." "Chronic anxiety," Mr. James continued, "marked the earlier part of this [nineteenth] ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... have a perfection, a solidity, and a fire that fit them for a place in that coronet one might fancy made up of the richest of the jewels of the world's music-makers, and fashioned for the very brows of the Muse herself. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... compose only when he was surrounded by smoking fowls and Bologna sausages; their fumes seemed to inflame his imagination, to feed his muse; his brain was stimulated first through his nose and then through his stomach. When Gluck wrote music he betook himself to the open fields, accompanied by at least two bottles of champagne. Salieri told Michael Kelly that a ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... to myself, who own it, when thou lookst Into the source and limit of all good, There, where thou markest that which thou dost speak, Thence priz'd of me the more. Glad thou hast made me. Now make intelligent, clearing the doubt Thy speech hath raised in me; for much I muse, How bitter can spring up, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... a right fair house, your library, your books, your gallery, and all other necessaries so handsome about you, where you might, in company with me, your wife, your children, and household, be merry, I muse what, in God's name, you mean, here thus fondly to tarry." Having heard her out—preserving his good-humor, he said to her, with a cheerful countenance, "I pray thee, good Mrs. Alice, tell me one thing!" "What ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the "Seasons," born, the son of the parish minister, at Ednam, Roxburghshire; was educated and trained for the ministry at Edinburgh University, but already wooing the muse, he, shortly after his father's death in 1725, went to London to push his fortune; his poem "Winter," published in the following year, had immediate success, and raised up a host of friends and patrons, and what with tutoring and the proceeds of "Summer," ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... (these are the words of the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette") by versions of two odes of Horace, and by "America," a poem after the manner of Pope's "Windsor Forest." At the age of nineteen he invoked the venerable Muse who has been called in as the "Poet's Lucina," since Homer established her professional reputation, and dashed boldly at the epic,—"the greatest work human nature is capable of." His great work was "The Conquest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... father, watching him with alert ears and eyes, for she saw that the old ruler was brooding over some matter of grave import, and she drew her own inference. Only when planning to wage war on an alien tribe or plotting against the Jamestown settlers did he so mope and muse and fail to respond to her overtures. Late one evening, when she saw two of his loyal warriors steal to his side, in order to hear their conversation better she climbed a near-by tree and listened to their muttered words. Her suspicions were confirmed. There was need of her intervention again. From ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... "Songs of Two Worlds" and "The Epic of Hades." As the Rev. Elvet Lewis writes of him: "Here at once we meet the true artist lost in his art. His humour is as playful as if the hand of a stern fate had never struck him on the face. His muse can laugh and make others laugh, or it can weep and make others weep." A specimen is given of one of his best known poems, "An Ode on the Day of Judgment," reproducing, as far as my powers have permitted, its final and internal ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... Muse illumes the maze For ages veil'd in gloomy night, Where empire with meridian blaze Once trod ambition's giddy height: Tho' headlong from the dang'rous steep Its pageants roll'd with wasteful sweep, Her tablet still records the deeds ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... bee Is reluctant to turn from the lily although The lily may obviously wish he would go And leave her to muse in the sunlight alone. Yet when the rose calls him, his sorrow, I own, Has its recompense. So from delight to delight I fly with my ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and I muse for why and never find the reason, I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun. Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season: Let us endure an hour and see ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... soft, and still, The Muse shall lead thee to the beech-grown hill, To spend in tea the cool, refreshing hour, Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower; Or where the hermit hangs the straw-clad cell, Emerging gently from the leafy dell, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White |
